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There are
executives who are social and there are executives who are
anti-social. There are executives who do social well and
executives that don’t. Some claim to be leading social organizations, and there are
those that boast that they are not. There are executives
who have thousands of followers, and there are executives that
have none.

There are social executives that say, “Trust me” or “Admire me,”
that tweet, “Believe me” or “Look at me,” or that yell, “Follow
me.” But there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are
actually creating next-generation social experiences for their
companies like Jeff Schick.

The IBM executive
doesn’t just leverage social business solutions, he and his team
create them.

“We started well over 15 years ago. We’ve been thinking about how
to better connect people with people and people with information
in terms of IBM
itself,” Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over
the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result
was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”

And the imperative has been in the IBM social laboratory ever
since. It’s been a big blue flame ignited by the IBM Bunsen
burner that is feeding off the social oxygen being pumped into
the IBM corridors. The results have been mixed, but the
more successful experiments are being incorporated into IBM’s
product roadmap.

So, true to IBM’s founding principles, Schick and team seem to be
following Thomas Watsons advice, “Once an organization loses its
spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress
stops.”

If you’re wondering what it means to be a social business, here’s
one litmus test anyone can take: does everyone in the
organization have permission to speak to customers on behalf of
the organization? If the paper turns blue, you’re definitely a
social business. If not, then your company’s Social pH
levels may need some adjustment.

At Big Blue, the company encourages the use of Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn,
and blogs to support their sales, communication, marketing and
recruiting efforts. While employee’s social interactions
are not under a microscope, the experiments in social on a
massive scale have led to a set of social business conduct
guidelines that govern their employees’ social interactions.
Schick advises that you need to establish behavior standards for
employees to follow.

The IBM Social laboratory is also using gamification and
crowdsourcing principles to reduce the cost of internal
projects. Schick cited a language translation and
localization effort for product manuals that typically cost the
company millions. Yet IBM was able to significantly reduce the
expense and increase accuracy by awarding points to employees who
helped translate the documents. Employees with the highest
point totals earned money for their charities.

IBM’s Social Chromatograph

Separating IBM’s social activity streams and analyzing behaviors
is a big focus for IBM. Schick explains, “Social analytics
is playing a huge role in not just making recommendations of
content, people and communities, but in recommending what an
organization need do to better its financial results. By
using Cognos Consumer Insight technology, we’ve
got detailed insight into the interaction of people and
content.”

IBM is also utilizing a social network analysis technology called
Atlas. Think of Atlas as both a map and
periodic table of social elements, used to determine how people
interact. “It can mine who’s reading who’s blog, who is
subscribing to who’s social bookmarks and who is subscribing to
specific communities,” explains Schick, “It can identify and draw
relationships between people and how they collaborate by
analyzing instant messaging, Notes Domino, Outlook Exchange and
other messaging solutions.”

It’s important to note that IBMs privacy policy doesn’t allow
this type of social networking analysis without the employee
opting in.

Predicative Analytics

Just as it’s important for chemists to predict the chemical
reactions that take place when chemicals are combined, it’s
equally important to predict social interactions and how people
might change. No one wants an explosive reaction, people
much prefer to anticipate and negate the negative reactions while
promoting the positive.

That is pretty much the reason IBM acquired SPSS in late 2009. Schick
explains, “From my perspective, we’re back to making better
informed decisions to derive greater value, better results and
better customer satisfaction. That’s an important aspect of
the role predictive analytics will play as social analytics
evolve.”

When IBM integrates their Cognos Consumer Insight solution with
IBM Connections, they are able to conduct
sentiment analysis across their communities, blogs, activities,
discussion forums, and micro-blogs to determine if projects are
going well or not. Add Atlas technology to the mix, and IBM
can also analyze sentiment in email. With that powerful
concoction, predicting the viability of internal projects will
get easier.

Mobile as Usual

“Every single thing we do includes ‘and mobile’ or ‘with mobile’.
So everything IBM is doing in the area of social business is
accessible through mobile devices. Connection’s entire
technology, every application and service is available on the
iPhone,
Android
device or Blackberry,” Schick said, “In order to be a great
solution, you’ve got to introduce mobile capacity in communities,
sharing documents, search, and interacting with people.”

But the most extraordinary and in some ways most appealing, is
the ability for IBM to capture analytics on their employee’s use
of mobile devices. Admittedly, it sounds Orwellian, but
some believe an employee’s true social network is best determined
by who and where they call and text on mobile devices. Assuming
IBM’s opt-in privacy policy extends to mobile, consider the
information that can be derived from mapping out a company’s
mobile social graph. It’s a brave new mobile
world.

So Why does IBM Represent the Future of Social
Business?

Becoming a social business is hard. In reality, a struggle.
Fortunately there are companies like IBM that can afford to
experiment with cultural and technological – social
transformation while the rest of us observe and
learn.

So why do they do it? Since they are both an early adopter and
creator of social technologies, they’ve learned that content
management, business process management, collaboration, commerce
and analytics must all be combined with a social layer to create
a universal and unified solution. Consequently, IBM
recognizes and is capitalizing on the market opportunities for
these solutions because 400,000 employees have proved it in their
corporate laboratory.

To emphasize the point, Schick said that most of the technologies
they bring to market are a direct result of the research and
testing they’ve done internally. So IBM does represent the future
of Social Business because they are willing to invest, test, fail
and succeed in becoming a social business.

That’s why while everyone else seems to be asking the questions,
IBM has the answers.